I seem to walk on a transparent surface and see beneath me all the bones and wrecks and tentacles that will eventually claim me: in other words, old age, incapacity, loneliness, death of others & myself...

Philip Larkin
About This Quote

This quote comes from the poem, "Old Age," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It's a beautiful and haunting poem that portrays many images of old age. One of the images that really stuck with me is the sense of loneliness and the inevitability of death. Here, Longfellow gives a very honest and insightful look at old age and what it feels like to know that you're going to die. The line '...in other words, old age...' says it all.

Source: Philip Larkin: Letters To Monica

Some Similar Quotes
  1. Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings. - Unknown
  2. My dear, Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you and let it devour your remains. For all things will... - Charles Bukowski
  3. If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled? - Jodi Picoult
  4. Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect. - J.k. Rowling
  5. Love is how you stay alive, even after you are gone. - Mitch Albom
More Quotes By Philip Larkin
  1. What will survive of us is love.
  2. Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone fidelity They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.
  3. I'm terrified of the thought of time passing (or whatever is meant by that phrase) whether I 'do' anything or not. In a way I may believe, deep down, that doing nothing acts as a brake on 'time's - it doesn't of course. It merely...
  4. I seem to walk on a transparent surface and see beneath me all the bones and wrecks and tentacles that will eventually claim me: in other words, old age, incapacity, loneliness, death of others & myself...
  5. One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the same day as we do ourselves.
Related Topics